Family Speech from YouTube

This is the written version of my Family video. I figured since I couldn't sleep and I was on this kick, I might as well do what I said I was going to do a while ago.
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In my family, ever since I can remember, we’ve had a certain saying that became much more important when our family had to go through serious issues with my brother’s incarceration and we became physically separated from him. Always Together Forever. We would write it as AT4E in all the letters we would send and say it every time we said goodbye. And now I think that my family needs it again. It’s not something that’s only applicable to his situation or to situations in which there is a conventional type of loss. This kind of reassurance matters just as much in unconventional circumstances, and I would argue that it matters more since we are less likely to encounter such reassurance in the larger social sphere. This kind of love should be unconditional. It’s an all-the-time thing.
My parents once I asked me why it was so important to me that they accept me or respond positively to my choice to transition. (I hesitate to use the word transition, even, because I don’t believe I’m changing into something that isn’t already there.) So, why is their support so important? It’s not that I expect total agreement at any point, and I certainly didn’t expect it at the outset. I expected exactly what did come—severe anguish, outrage, disgust, disbelief, depression, and a sense of loss on their part. These feelings are understandable, but at some point, family needs to understand that this decision belongs to you, and that your feelings are indeed stable and rational—that you have thought it through deeply and painstakingly and that you are aware of all the risks, physical and otherwise, that may arise as you proceed with transition. At this point, family members need to step up. While it is important for trans people to understand and empathize with their grieving family members, it is also important for the family members to realize that this situation is not about them. Furthermore, they need to move past preconceived dreams that they had for their child’s future and start to understand how much happier and fulfilled their child will be living the life that he or she truly desires.
Again, why does it matter? Parents who reject their children often say that the child has also rejected them to find family and comfort in friends and that it shouldn’t matter to their child if they support them anyway. But, like most of us in this society, we have grown up with the notion that family loves unconditionally—that they are there when you have nowhere else to run—that when the rest of the world is bombarding us with hate and oppression, we may find solace and comfort in the arms of those who taught us to be the proud, shining people that we are. The last thing that we would expect from these people, who have been there with us throughout the ups and downs of our lives, is a supplement to the transphobic onslaught we are likely to face by some. The last thing we need in our times of desperation and fear are shots of I told you so. When all else goes wrong, and we are forced to hide our true selves from the rest of the world, what we desire most is that safe space with those who supposedly know us the best. We desire that space where we can be and say anything we want—where we don’t have to worry about putting on airs or keeping our guard up. We want the people and places that hold our memories. We want community and stability and familiarity. In short, we want a place where we can be home.
It’s a true test of the family as a whole when something like this arises—when a child tells you that he or she is transgender and wants to pursue gender reassignment options. It’s a test of that unconditional nature of love—the love of a person as a person and not as a normative model for gender. The transgender child bursts a protective bubble that this society has created around the revered “traditional family” model. We shatter norms that most people cling to, hold onto for dear life, as if they risk drowning in the sea of difference that lies beneath their raft of glass. How is this accomplished? We introduce “the Other” into their environment. We bring the foreign, the unknown and feared, right to them. It’s something that just can’t be ignored or dismissed. It’s the same sort of shattering of worlds that goes on when people erroneously assume that cancer, diabetes, and alcoholism are issues that affect other people and families, and not themselves. People unfamiliar with the concept of transgender and transsexual people immediately conjure up popular media representations of the Jerry Springer tranny. They fear being labeled freaks. They fear being different. Yet they somehow do not look to us, the transgendered, in these times. Do they think that we don’t know this same fear? We face this fear every day, and many of us have learned to embrace being different, turning the problem completely around, loving every bit of who we are as individuals, no matter what the fuck anyone else out there has to say about it. I think that parents of trans people should really look to their children to see how strong this has made them--look at their children to see how proud they are of their identity.
Another question several members of my family asked me, quite accusatorily, was why didn’t I tell them first? Why did I have to tell all of my friends and use internet means to convey this information to some? Why did I leave them in the dark to be blindsided by this when they received a phone call from a family member who happened to see my facebook page?
I can first say that I didn’t intend for my parents to be informed by anyone else. I had planned to tell them myself. And that’s the tough part. It’s something you have to plan for. a lot. Coming out as trans to your parents takes unspeakable courage. It takes everything you have to work up to that. You lose sleep over it. You cry over it. You turn it over and over in your head and try to figure out exactly how you are going to do it and when. And a lot of the time, you know exactly how your family is going to react. In my case, I knew that it would be bad. To quote Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird about the level of courage you need for this task… “It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”
It’s like facing a firing squad. Signing up to be a kamikaze pilot. You risk losing everything. You risk losing the love of the most important people in the world to you. You risk losing your home. You risk your education, if you are financially dependent on them. It’s a huge burden to have to deal with the issue of having to tell your family, and for this reason it is hugely important to build a strong network of social support before you tell them. It’s important that you have somewhere to turn when disaster strikes—that you CAN make that 4 am phone call in hysteria to your best friend. It’s important to surround yourself with people that understand you and will love you no matter what may happen with your family. This social support network is what often prevents depression in cancer patients, what helps the newly divorced move on with their lives, which helps all the grieving in the world carry on to the next day. With this support network and with our composure the best that it can be, only then can we approach our families. It is not that we have not thought through every little detail of the process over and over again. It is not that the thought has suddenly arisen out of nowhere. It is not a whim. It’s not a game. And it isn’t something that goes away. It’s something that most of us have known all of our lives, whether we have had a name for it the entire time or not.
We ask that you understand these things. We ask that you respect us. We ask that you try to learn as much as you can without feeling the need to cram statistics of death and unemployment in our faces. Do not assume that we aren’t aware of what awaits us. We are very aware. And that is why we need you more than anyone else. We need you because we know that things aren’t perfect for anyone in this world, and that being different makes it a hell of a lot harder. We need you because we have so many wonderful memories with you and want the opportunity to create more of them with you. All in all, what this really means is that we need you, because we love you.